I know that Africa and Asia used to be Roman provinces, and I assume that they gave their names to the continents they were on, but what about Europe? When exactly did Europe come to be called “Europe,” and where did that name come from?
On a related topic, I would also like to know where the term “Caucasian” came from. I checked in the dictionary, and it mentioned that the Caucasus region was where the first white man was supposedly sighted, but it didn’t give any more details. How about some help?
Pretend this has Gwendolyn Brooks’
poem ‘We Real Cool’ here, 'coz it’s
got too many lines to fit comfortably
(too bad, it’s my favourite poem).
I thought Europa was one of Zeus’ many rape victims. I recall a story of Zeus taking the form of a bull and chasing her all the way from Greece to the Atlantic (giving the land she crossed its name). Anyway, Zues caught her, knocked her up and the resulting offspring was King Minos of Crete.
I think “caucasian”, as it is most commonly used, is a corruption of Caucasoid. White people as a whole were referred to as the Caucasoid Race since Caucasians typified the race. That is, every Caucasoid ethnic group should look more or less like Caucasians, even if they didn’t look much like each other. Scottsmen don’t look much like Hindustanis, but the Caucasians are in between, so to speak.
The “three race” system has fallen out of favor. Nobody calls Vietnamese, or Japanese, or Malays “Mongoloid people” any more. Least not out loud. Ditto for the “Negroid Race”, which contained teensy Bushmen, towering Tutsis, and straight-haired Ethiopians.
I’m just pointing out that it wasn’t really proper in the old anthropological taxonomy to call any body caucasian, except folks from the Caucasus. (The racial definition has made into the dictionary, though. It’s just not “anthropologically correct”.)
“Europe” comes from a Semitic word meaning “evening.” I’m not sure which language directly contributed the word, but the Hebrew word for evening is erev. The sun sets in the west, and since Europe is to the west of lands in which Semitic languages are spoken, it was named after the evening.
Thank you, Great Hammer, for the answer to my Europe question. What I wanted to know from the Caucasian question was the details of the story about the first white man. Who sighted him? Is it some kind of myth? As always, your help (meaning all of you) is appreciated.
I forgot to add, no one answered me about when Europe started to be called Europe. Sometime in the First Millenium, say the latter half? Is that a close guess?
Pretend this has Gwendolyn Brooks’
poem ‘We Real Cool’ here, 'coz it’s
got too many lines to fit comfortably
(too bad, it’s my favourite poem).
Christoph Meiners theorized in 1785 that there were two racial categories, Caucasian & Mongolian; he named the ones he considered attractive Caucasians–with everybody else Mongolians. Johan Friedrich Blumenbach expanded the racial classifications to the ones that remained for a very long time. His definition of varietas Caucasia…
Yes, I used Wikipedia; but I’d remembered Blumenbach’s reason for the name. Science has left his theories behind–but he actually believed that members of all races were capable of excellence, making him less “racist” than many who came after him.
Europe? I know the myth but don’t have a clue as to how it came to describe what Barry Cunliffe calls
My daughter, who goes to high school with a lot of Armenian (well, Armenian-American) kids, tells me that they vehemently deny that Armenians are Caucasians.
As Armenia is slap bang in the Caucasus, my first thought was that what they really meant to deny was that they are Europeans, but it seems that, on certain quite widely accepted conceptions of the boundaries of Europe, Armenia is (just about) in Europe, too.
My best guess is that what they really mean to say is that they are not Anglos.
Etymonline.com names a different coiner than Bridget Burke does, but the idea’s the same.
Both cases are examples of the Europeans’ increased preoccupation with race and racial distinctions in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nothing new, but now covered with a veneer of science.
What really gets the word out, literally, is that Caucausian women - here referring to the location - start being mythologized as white slave girls, taken by the Arabs to their harems because of their great beauty. Jean-Baptiste Chaplin writes of the province Georgia in 1689:
Putting the most beautiful and desirable women in the world in the ancestral home of Europe had obvious implications for people who had started to believe that they were the superior branch of humanity. Caucasian meant superior, and stayed that way for two centuries.
BTW, the OP seemed to have confused ancestral home with first sighting of a white man. The real derivation of the word Caucasus comes is the more prosaic “white with snow.”
